Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

FBI raids offices of Jewish philanthropists implicated in Ukrainian money-laundering scheme

The FBI raided real estate offices associated with two prominent Jewish philanthropists Tuesday morning, likely in connection to a money-laundering scheme out of Ukraine that was the subject of a Forward investigation earlier this year.

The FBI searched the Cleveland and Miami offices of Optima Management Group, said Special Agent Vicki Anderson-Gregg at the FBI’s office in Cleveland. Optima is a conglomerate of companies operated in part by Chabad donors Mordechai Korf and Uriel Laber, who were named in a 2019 lawsuit that accused them of helping oligarchs launder money from a Ukrainian bank.

Korf and Laber owned and managed shell entities in the United States and bought other businesses using laundered money, the lawsuit says.

Anderson-Gregg declined to provide additional details about the raid, saying “everything is under seal,” but clarified that no one was taken into custody.

Korf and Laber owned shares in an overseas unit of a Ukrainian bank, PrivatBank. The bank “was subjected to a large, coordinated money-laundering scheme and bank fraud” to benefit its shareholders’ and their affiliates’ “business and personal interests,” according to a 2018 report by a Ukranian government entity.

The Daily Beast reported last spring that a Ukranian oligarch, Igor Kolomoisky, was being investigated by the FBI, in part for his role in the PrivatBank scheme, but this is the first action that confirms their report.

Cleveland.com reported that federal agents were seen carrying computers, boxes and other items out of the office at One Cleveland Center. The Miami office is located on South Biscayne Boulevard.

Molly Boigon is an investigative reporter at the Forward. Contact her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @MollyBoigon.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.